Designing the new Join Journey

The Challenge
As a leading entertainment and communications provider in the UK, Virgin Media have led technological innovation in television services and high-speed broadband since the forming of the company in 2006.

Virgin Media were looking to innovate beyond their products and to deliver an improved customer experience - designed to increase value for customers and for the business, raising Net Promoter Scores and building brand affinity and differentiation.

As an inaugural project, Engine Service Design worked in collaboration with Virgin’s in-house Customer Experience Design Team to focus on the early stages of the customer relationship - the Join Journey.

The work delivered a set of design principles and the design of an ideal journey and new touchpoints that focused on behaviour, process and technology.

Insights gathered from interviewing customers

The Approach

Insight to ideas
We spent time shadowing and interviewing customers, employees and stakeholders to develop a richer understanding of customer needs, motivations and behaviours, and the people, products and processes involved in delivery. We also looked at analogous experiences of other service providers outside Virgin Media’s industry.

This insight was used as inspiration in a series of co-creation workshops with both staff and customers to stimulate idea generation for an improved and innovative service experience.

Insights gathered from shadowing staff

Designing the ideal journey and service principles
The work culminated in the design of a new customer journey containing a number of concepts and features involving new technology, processes and behaviours, and an accompanying set of bespoke design principles all aligned by adherence to simplicity and efficiency.

An important aspect of the new Join Journey is the unifying theme of the journey, which illustrates how every interaction can be used to learn about the customer and to deliver a relevant, delightful and efficient experience.

The features of the journey, its touchpoints and the value they deliver

The Results
The project was presented to over 20 people from marketing and operations - many of whom were involved in the research and idea generation phase of the project - in a highly interactive session to allow for feedback and alignment to current initiatives.

The Virgin Media Customer Experience team is now working on implementing this new journey and embedding the new principles that will inform future design projects within the business.